* Astronomy

Sound waves in a fluid behave uncannily like light waves in space. Black holes even have acoustic counterparts. Could spacetime literally be a kind of fluid, like the ether of pre-Einsteinian physics? When Albert Einstein proposed his special theory of relativity in 1905, he rejected the 1...

The quest for a single theory that unites all of the universe's fundamental forces has thus far eluded physicists, but that has not stopped a team of them from clearing the way for nanotechnologists while they look for it. The group, which includes Purdue University's Ephraim Fischbach, has re...

Spontaneous Inflation and the Origin of the Arrow of Time Microscopic laws of physics are essentially time-reversal invariant, but macroscopic thermodynamics exhibits a profound time-asymmetry; entropy typically increases in closed systems. This intriguing feature of the real w...

Cosmologists from Princeton University have proposed a new technique that will be able to determine if the cosmic acceleration (expansion of the universe) is due to a yet unknown form of Dark Energy in the universe or if it is a signature of a breakdown of Einstein's theory of Gener...

Theoretical physicists in the Netherlands have proposed a way to make superstrings in the laboratory. If their idea can be put into practice, it would allow aspects of string theory to be explored in an experiment for the first time. The new approach relies on exploiting the properties of ultr...

Kent State faculty and graduate students are among a team of physicists who recreated the material essence of the universe as it would have been mere microseconds after the Big Bang—a quark-gluon plasma. This huge insight allows scientists to study matter in its earliest form and comes from an...

Mathematicians have mapped the inner workings of one of the most complicated structures ever studied: the object known as the exceptional Lie group E8. This achievement is significant both as an advance in basic knowledge and because of the many connections between E8 and other areas, including...

The hype has subsided and now chaos theory is a ubiquitous part of science. Chaos theory, the study of how tiny fluctuations can have tremendous effects within a moving system, emerged in mainstream physics about 30 years ago. The signa...

A number of signals involving charged cosmic rays and high-energy photons have been interpreted as being due to annihilating Dark Matter. This article provides an overview of the experimental evidence and di... >

Twistor theory has been developed by Roger Penrose and his associates since the 1960s. He realised that using the space-time continuum picture to describe physical processes is inadequate not only at the Planck scale of 10-33 cm but also at the much larger scales of elementary particles, or perhap...

Data from the Sloan Sky Survey show that quasars and galaxy associations are random. There's no solid evidence for any non-AGN process behind QSO phenomena, just random statistical coincidences. This is another, and hopefully final, nail in the coffin for the Steady State theory. Cr...

A cyclic universe, which bounces through a series of big bangs and "big crunches", could solve the puzzle of our cosmological con...

Stephen Hawkings was the first physicists to publish a paper on Multiverse. The idea that the Universe is actulaly made up of many Universe's. It stands to reason that this may be the exact thing. The Multiverse theory opens up the idea of how young or how old this Universe might be. It has been discove...

Title: Almost Certain Escape from Black Holes in Final State Projection Models Author: Seth Lloyd Recent models of the black-hole final state suggest that quantum information can escape from a black hole by a process akin to teleportation. These models rely on a controvers...

If, for some reason, you managed to make an egg stand on its end during the recent equinox, experimental physicists could do with your help. An exquisitely sensitive experiment that can only be performed during equinoxes could test some of the theories that offer an alternative to dark matter. Star...

Quantum entanglement could be responsible for mass, and could finally explain why the fundamental particles of matter have the mass they do. Sometimes, the interaction of two particles, say electrons, causes their individual properties, such as spin, to become "entangled". If y...

Title: Unparticle Physics Author: Howard Georgi I discuss some simple aspects of the low-energy physics of a nontrivial scale invariant sector of an effective field theory - physics that cannot be described in terms of particles. I argue that it is important to take seriously the possibility that...

For budding time travellers, the future (or should that be the past?) is starting to look bleak. Hypothetical tunnels called wormholes once looked like the best bet for constructing a real time machine. These cosmic shortcuts, which link one point in the Universe to another, are fa...

Light may arise from tiny relativity violations, according to a new theory. Speaking most recently at last month's American Physical Society meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics in Nebraska, Alan Kostelecky of Indiana University described how light mi...

Any vibrating object should be slowed by quantum "virtual" particles that permeate empty space, according to theory. This weak "friction" should spew photons like sparks from a dangling bumper. In the 26 May PRL researchers propose detecting this effect by vibrating one end of a small reflective...

Title: On the Primordial Helium Abundance and the DeltaY/DeltaO Ratio Authors: M. Peimbert (IA-Unam), V. Luridiana (IAA, Csic), A. Peimbert (IA-Unam), L. Carigi (IA-Unam) We present a review on the determination of the primordial helium abundance, Yp, based on the study...

Like a Hologram, the Universe Merely Appears to Have Three Spatial Dimensions. In quantum physics, nothing is as it seems. As physicists continue to study the universe they continually run into new questions that shake how humans understand the universe's intricate mechanics. ...

Title: New Ekpyrotic Cosmology Authors: Evgeny I. Buchbinder, Justin Khoury, Burt A. Ovrut (Version v4) In this paper, we present a new scenario of the early Universe that contains a pre big bang Ekpyrotic phase. By combining this with a ghost condensate, the theory explicitly violates the null en...

From BBC: Astronomers have detected a faint glow from the first stars to form in the Universe, Nature journal reports. This earliest group of stars, called Population III, probably formed from primordial gas less than 200 million years after the Big Bang. These objects cannot be seen by an...

In everyday life the number of dimensions refers to the minimum number of measurements required to specify the position of an object, such as latitude, longitude and altitude. Implicit in this definition is that space is smooth and obeys the laws of classical physics. But what if space is not so well...

According to a new analysis of the Everett (Many-Worlds) interpretation of quantum theory, our universe may one day be assimilated by a larger universe. Alternative universes that some theorists think may exist in parallel to our universe could interact, and could ultimately destroy it. ...

Title: A Map of the Universe Authors: Gott, J. Richard, III; Juri, Mario; Schlegel, David; Hoyle, Fiona; Vogeley, Michael; Tegmark, Max; Bahcall, Neta; Brinkmann, Jon We have produced a new conformal map of the universe illustrating recent discoveries, ranging from Kuiper Belt ob...

Title: Large Volume Axionic Swiss-Cheese Inflation Authors: Aalok Misra, Pramod Shukla (Version v5) Continuing with the ideas of (section 4 of) [1], after inclusion of perturbative and non-perturbative alpha' corrections to the Kaehler potential and (D1- and D3-) instanton generated superp...

The Universe is beige After studying the colour of light emitted by 200,000 galaxies scientists have combined them to produce the colour, they have dubbed 'cosmic latte'. Other names suggested for it were 'univeige' and 'skyvory'. But apparently this colour has changed over the last six billion y...

20th April 2005 Cool spaces in the cosmic microwave background, thought to be the 'birthmarks' of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, should be bigger, according to new analysis of satellite data by scientists at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. This new analysis suggests that ther...

A new simulation method recently developed by Stanford astrophysicist Marcelo Alvarez and Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship student Patrick Ho spurns complexity to make headway in understanding the early universe's structure formation. Collapsing a complicated trajectory int...

Title: The Cosmic Horizon Authors: Fulvio Melia The cosmological principle, promoting the view that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic, is embodied within the mathematical structure of the Robertson-Walker (RW) metric. The equations derived from an application of this metric to the Ei...

Cosmic Dawn z=8.5 shows the Universe 590 million years after the Big Bang Scientists have used a computer simulation to predict what the very early Universe would have appeared like 500 million years after the Big Bang. The images, produced by scientists at Durham University's Institute for Compu...

That intergalactic road trip to Triangulum is going to take a little longer than you had planned. An Ohio State University astronomer and his colleagues have determined that the Triangulum Galaxy,...

Is the matter in the universe arranged in a fractal pattern? A new study of nearly a million galaxies suggests it is though there are no well-accepted theories to explain why that would be so. Cosmologists trying to reconstruct the entire history of the universe have precious few clues from which to w...

How big is the universe? Can the human mind comprehend it? Let's give it a go ... This is a talk given at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge by Luke Barnes, in November 2008. Getting your brain around the universe - Part 1 Click to Play | View Details Getting your brain around the univers...

	Forum	Replies	Views	Last Post
Universe Time Space-time ( 1 2 3 4 5 … 13 ) (Preview)	Physics News	120	30872	Sep 12 14:35 2015 by Blobrana
Sound waves in a fluid behave uncannily like light waves in space. Black holes even have acoustic counterparts. Could spacetime literally be a kind of fluid, like the ether of pre-Einsteinian physics? When Albert Einstein proposed his special theory of relativity in 1905, he rejected the 1...
Universe Theory of Everything ( 1 2 3 4 ) (Preview)	Cosmology News	30	13220	Oct 27 10:46 2016 by Blobrana
The quest for a single theory that unites all of the universe's fundamental forces has thus far eluded physicists, but that has not stopped a team of them from clearing the way for nanotechnologists while they look for it. The group, which includes Purdue University's Ephraim Fischbach, has re...
Universe Time Arrow of Time ( 1 2 3 4 5 … 6 ) (Preview)	Physics News	55	25291	Mar 27 12:14 2017 by Blobrana
Spontaneous Inflation and the Origin of the Arrow of Time Microscopic laws of physics are essentially time-reversal invariant, but macroscopic thermodynamics exhibits a profound time-asymmetry; entropy typically increases in closed systems. This intriguing feature of the real w...
Universe Dark Energy ( 1 2 3 4 5 … 20 ) (Preview)	Cosmology News	198	28983	May 5 12:02 2015 by Blobrana
Cosmologists from Princeton University have proposed a new technique that will be able to determine if the cosmic acceleration (expansion of the universe) is due to a yet unknown form of Dark Energy in the universe or if it is a signature of a breakdown of Einstein's theory of Gener...
Universe Quantum Superstrings ( 1 2 3 4 5 … 9 ) (Preview)	Physics News	83	32168	Apr 25 10:21 2017 by Blobrana
Theoretical physicists in the Netherlands have proposed a way to make superstrings in the laboratory. If their idea can be put into practice, it would allow aspects of string theory to be explored in an experiment for the first time. The new approach relies on exploiting the properties of ultr...
Universe Big Bang ( 1 2 3 4 5 … 8 ) (Preview)	Cosmology News	74	19387	Apr 5 11:49 2017 by Blobrana
Kent State faculty and graduate students are among a team of physicists who recreated the material essence of the universe as it would have been mere microseconds after the Big Bang—a quark-gluon plasma. This huge insight allows scientists to study matter in its earliest form and comes from an...
Universe Lie group Quantum Lie group E8 ( 1 2 ) (Preview)	Physics News	19	15739	Mar 1 13:06 2012 by Blobrana
Mathematicians have mapped the inner workings of one of the most complicated structures ever studied: the object known as the exceptional Lie group E8. This achievement is significant both as an advance in basic knowledge and because of the many connections between E8 and other areas, including...
Universe Chaos Theory (Preview)	Physics News	0	2931	Apr 6 14:10 2007 by Blobrana
The hype has subsided and now chaos theory is a ubiquitous part of science. Chaos theory, the study of how tiny fluctuations can have tremendous effects within a moving system, emerged in mainstream physics about 30 years ago. The signa...
Darkmatter Universe Dark matter ( 1 2 3 4 5 … 43 ) (Preview)	Cosmology News	427	49928	Apr 28 19:48 2017 by Blobrana
A number of signals involving charged cosmic rays and high-energy photons have been interpreted as being due to annihilating Dark Matter. This article provides an overview of the experimental evidence and di... >
Universe Twistor theory (Preview)	Physics News	2	1999	Jun 7 15:46 2010 by Blobrana
Twistor theory has been developed by Roger Penrose and his associates since the 1960s. He realised that using the space-time continuum picture to describe physical processes is inadequate not only at the Planck scale of 10-33 cm but also at the much larger scales of elementary particles, or perhap...
Universe Steady State theory dead (Preview)	Cosmology News	0	1579	Jun 17 04:37 2005 by Blobrana
Data from the Sloan Sky Survey show that quasars and galaxy associations are random. There's no solid evidence for any non-AGN process behind QSO phenomena, just random statistical coincidences. This is another, and hopefully final, nail in the coffin for the Steady State theory. Cr...
Universe Cyclic Universe ( 1 2 3 4 5 … 8 ) (Preview)	Cosmology News	71	25423	Jan 26 15:44 2016 by Blobrana
A cyclic universe, which bounces through a series of big bangs and "big crunches", could solve the puzzle of our cosmological con...
Universe Multiverses ( 1 2 3 ) (Preview)	All queries go here	27	24970	Dec 18 17:39 2015 by Blobrana
Stephen Hawkings was the first physicists to publish a paper on Multiverse. The idea that the Universe is actulaly made up of many Universe's. It stands to reason that this may be the exact thing. The Multiverse theory opens up the idea of how young or how old this Universe might be. It has been discove...
Blackholes Universe Quantum Quantum information ( 1 2 3 ) (Preview)	Physics News	28	13581	Jul 4 09:56 2017 by Blobrana
Title: Almost Certain Escape from Black Holes in Final State Projection Models Author: Seth Lloyd Recent models of the black-hole final state suggest that quantum information can escape from a black hole by a process akin to teleportation. These models rely on a controvers...
Universe Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) (Preview)	Cosmology News	6	3069	Sep 3 21:09 2015 by Blobrana
If, for some reason, you managed to make an egg stand on its end during the recent equinox, experimental physicists could do with your help. An exquisitely sensitive experiment that can only be performed during equinoxes could test some of the theories that offer an alternative to dark matter. Star...
Universe Quantum Quantum entanglement ( 1 2 3 4 5 ) (Preview)	Physics News	41	29057	Jul 12 09:53 2017 by Blobrana
Quantum entanglement could be responsible for mass, and could finally explain why the fundamental particles of matter have the mass they do. Sometimes, the interaction of two particles, say electrons, causes their individual properties, such as spin, to become "entangled". If y...
Universe Unparticle Physics (Preview)	Physics News	0	1620	Jun 16 10:17 2007 by Blobrana
Title: Unparticle Physics Author: Howard Georgi I discuss some simple aspects of the low-energy physics of a nontrivial scale invariant sector of an effective field theory - physics that cannot be described in terms of particles. I argue that it is important to take seriously the possibility that...
Universe Wormholes (Preview)	Physics News	9	5147	Apr 27 08:41 2011 by Blobrana
For budding time travellers, the future (or should that be the past?) is starting to look bleak. Hypothetical tunnels called wormholes once looked like the best bet for constructing a real time machine. These cosmic shortcuts, which link one point in the Universe to another, are fa...
Universe Light Light ( 1 2 3 4 5 … 6 ) (Preview)	Physics News	52	26880	Sep 27 08:38 2016 by Blobrana
Light may arise from tiny relativity violations, according to a new theory. Speaking most recently at last month's American Physical Society meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics in Nebraska, Alan Kostelecky of Indiana University described how light mi...
Universe Quantum Virtual Particles ( 1 2 ) (Preview)	Physics News	11	6340	Apr 25 09:56 2014 by Blobrana
Any vibrating object should be slowed by quantum "virtual" particles that permeate empty space, according to theory. This weak "friction" should spew photons like sparks from a dangling bumper. In the 26 May PRL researchers propose detecting this effect by vibrating one end of a small reflective...
Universe Helium Primordial Helium Abundance (Preview)	Cosmology News	5	2391	Aug 19 18:38 2008 by Blobrana
Title: On the Primordial Helium Abundance and the DeltaY/DeltaO Ratio Authors: M. Peimbert (IA-Unam), V. Luridiana (IAA, Csic), A. Peimbert (IA-Unam), L. Carigi (IA-Unam) We present a review on the determination of the primordial helium abundance, Yp, based on the study...
Universe Holographic Principle (Preview)	Physics News	3	3918	Feb 4 12:15 2009 by Blobrana
Like a Hologram, the Universe Merely Appears to Have Three Spatial Dimensions. In quantum physics, nothing is as it seems. As physicists continue to study the universe they continually run into new questions that shake how humans understand the universe's intricate mechanics. ...
Universe Ekpyrotic Cosmology ( 1 2 ) (Preview)	Cosmology News	16	9287	Mar 27 00:01 2012 by Blobrana
Title: New Ekpyrotic Cosmology Authors: Evgeny I. Buchbinder, Justin Khoury, Burt A. Ovrut (Version v4) In this paper, we present a new scenario of the early Universe that contains a pre big bang Ekpyrotic phase. By combining this with a ghost condensate, the theory explicitly violates the null en...
Universe First stars Glow From The First Stars In The Universe ( 1 2 ) (Preview)	Stars/galaxy News	16	10063	Jun 13 16:44 2012 by Blobrana
From BBC: Astronomers have detected a faint glow from the first stars to form in the Universe, Nature journal reports. This earliest group of stars, called Population III, probably formed from primordial gas less than 200 million years after the Big Bang. These objects cannot be seen by an...
Universe Dimensions ( 1 2 ) (Preview)	Physics News	10	7148	Jun 7 04:14 2012 by Blobrana
In everyday life the number of dimensions refers to the minimum number of measurements required to specify the position of an object, such as latitude, longitude and altitude. Implicit in this definition is that space is smooth and obeys the laws of classical physics. But what if space is not so well...
Universe Mangled universe (Preview)	Physics News	0	1506	Feb 23 19:40 2006 by Blobrana
According to a new analysis of the Everett (Many-Worlds) interpretation of quantum theory, our universe may one day be assimilated by a larger universe. Alternative universes that some theorists think may exist in parallel to our universe could interact, and could ultimately destroy it. ...
Universe Map of the Universe (Preview)	Cosmology News	1	1854	Aug 15 16:54 2008 by Blobrana
Title: A Map of the Universe Authors: Gott, J. Richard, III; Juri, Mario; Schlegel, David; Hoyle, Fiona; Vogeley, Michael; Tegmark, Max; Bahcall, Neta; Brinkmann, Jon We have produced a new conformal map of the universe illustrating recent discoveries, ranging from Kuiper Belt ob...
Universe Inflation ( 1 2 3 4 ) (Preview)	Cosmology News	39	14628	Oct 21 16:05 2016 by Blobrana
Title: Large Volume Axionic Swiss-Cheese Inflation Authors: Aalok Misra, Pramod Shukla (Version v5) Continuing with the ideas of (section 4 of) [1], after inclusion of perturbative and non-perturbative alpha' corrections to the Kaehler potential and (D1- and D3-) instanton generated superp...
Universe The Universe ( 1 2 ) (Preview)	Cosmology News	15	6738	May 19 14:22 2017 by Blobrana
The Universe is beige After studying the colour of light emitted by 200,000 galaxies scientists have combined them to produce the colour, they have dubbed 'cosmic latte'. Other names suggested for it were 'univeige' and 'skyvory'. But apparently this colour has changed over the last six billion y...
Universe CBR ( 1 2 3 4 5 … 7 ) (Preview)	Cosmology News	66	27908	Sep 22 10:22 2016 by Blobrana
20th April 2005 Cool spaces in the cosmic microwave background, thought to be the 'birthmarks' of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, should be bigger, according to new analysis of satellite data by scientists at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. This new analysis suggests that ther...
Universe The Reionisation epoch ( 1 2 ) (Preview)	Cosmology News	10	6482	Mar 3 17:07 2017 by Blobrana
A new simulation method recently developed by Stanford astrophysicist Marcelo Alvarez and Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship student Patrick Ho spurns complexity to make headway in understanding the early universe's structure formation. Collapsing a complicated trajectory int...
Universe Cosmic Horizon (Preview)	Cosmology News	1	1776	Jan 23 19:06 2009 by Blobrana
Title: The Cosmic Horizon Authors: Fulvio Melia The cosmological principle, promoting the view that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic, is embodied within the mathematical structure of the Robertson-Walker (RW) metric. The equations derived from an application of this metric to the Ei...
Universe Cosmic Dawn (Preview)	Cosmology News	0	1287	Feb 11 06:09 2009 by Blobrana
Cosmic Dawn z=8.5 shows the Universe 590 million years after the Big Bang Scientists have used a computer simulation to predict what the very early Universe would have appeared like 500 million years after the Big Bang. The images, produced by scientists at Durham University's Institute for Compu...
Universe Universe is Bigger ( 1 2 3 ) (Preview)	Cosmology News	22	15954	Oct 19 05:53 2011 by Blobrana
That intergalactic road trip to Triangulum is going to take a little longer than you had planned. An Ohio State University astronomer and his colleagues have determined that the Triangulum Galaxy,...
Universe large scale structures ( 1 2 3 ) (Preview)	Cosmology News	28	11295	Jul 5 18:58 2014 by Blobrana
Is the matter in the universe arranged in a fractal pattern? A new study of nearly a million galaxies suggests it is though there are no well-accepted theories to explain why that would be so. Cosmologists trying to reconstruct the entire history of the universe have precious few clues from which to w...
Universe How big is the universe? (Preview)	Videos	0	1419	May 22 11:54 2009 by Blobrana
How big is the universe? Can the human mind comprehend it? Let's give it a go ... This is a talk given at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge by Luke Barnes, in November 2008. Getting your brain around the universe - Part 1 Click to Play \| View Details Getting your brain around the univers...